What was most important about the Revolution? What can we learn?
Interview
"Well, I think I'm very familiar (with the Velvet Revolution) for the simple reason that both my wife and I are natives of the former Czechoslovakia, and for forty years, we couldn't go in, or we chose not to go in, and when the Velvet Revolution was taking place, we were just glued to the television sets to see what was going on there... In Czechoslovakia at the time, there were my brother in law, my wife's brother, his wife, his two children, my wife's cousin, and a few members of my family. We've been out of touch for forty years...
The tradgedy is, as I see it from the outside, that the people who were playing the game with the communists are now in better position than people who didn't. They had the education, they had the good jobs and experience...
What can we take from the Velvet Revolution? I would say first of all, that freedom is precious an that freedom is achievable without violence."
Further Analysis
I like the quote "Freedom is precious and that freedom is achievable without violence." It really shows us what we could learn from the Velvet Revolution but haven't.
Today, the revolutions in East Europe are regarded as proof that communism just doesn't work. They have fallen out of the realm of excitement in history. This is a shame, because if we took more time to remember this movement toward change, we would see that there were two types of revolutions occurring. Obviously, there were revolutions against oppressive communist governments. The second kind was in the Velvet Revolution alone; The Velvet Revolution showed that violence is not an inherent quality of revolution and in that way is a revolution of revolutions.